Enjoy this great sketch from Australian comedy duo Lachlan and Jaxon Fairbairn, making fun of America's slow-poke election count. Simple, funny and merciless.
One oddity of the glacial vote count is that while every expert is plainly giving it to Biden in private (or coding his victory as jokes on Twitter), they're still formally calling the election a toss-up.
This reticence, while understandable as a form of reputation management, is misleading normal Americans outside the media-politics bubble into thinking that Trump's got a good chance of winning, when in fact that's very unlikely now. This will make a Biden win seem more surprising, which in turn gives oxygen to Trump's false narrative that the election is being suddenly, fraudulently stolen from him.
The rest of the world, however, naturally think in terms of how many votes candidates have and feel more comfortable looking beyond the Electoral College. In the vote, Biden's lead is unassailable—perhaps as much as 6 or 7%.
Journalists abroad understand the Electoral College—they're not jumping the gun on the basis of the raw vote. They're just better able to see past the last moment when it will matter, which lets them talk more bluntly about the politics on the ground. Here's the largest-circulation paper in the UK today:
Compare that to the USA Today (the largest circulation paper in the US) this morning.
It seems more reasonable, more neutral. But in its own way it's just as editorialized, given that Trump actually needs something magical happen to pull off a win.
